Mary Riter Hamilton

Mary Riter was born in Teeswater, Ontario, and raised in Clearwater, Manitoba.

In 1889 she married Charles W. Hamilton and moved to Port Arthur, Ontario, where Charles owned one of the town’s general stores. In 1893, following her husband's death, she returned to Manitoba, where she opened a china painting school. In 1901, following a brief period of study in Toronto, she travelled to study in Europe. She spent a year in Berlin studying under Italian landscape artist Franz Skarbina, then in Paris studying Jacques-Emile Blanche and Paul-Jean Gervais.

In 1911 her mother became ill and Hamilton returned to Winnipeg. She brought almost one hundred and fifty oils and water colors, which she placed in several galleries. Unable to return to Europe due to World War I, she began to paint the Alberta landscape, including scenes native Indians. Although her work was well received, she was unable to support herself with her painting.

In 1919 Hamilton was commissioned by H. F. Paton’s Gold Stripe to produce paintings of the French battlefields, and she spent the next three years living in France in a tin hut amid the Chinese workers hired to clear the debris from the Western Front. The resulting work was published in the Gold Stripe and exhibited in Vancouver and Victoria. She was awarded the purple ribbon of Les Palmes Academiques, the Order of Public Instruction, at the Somme Memorial Exhibit and the gold medal at the International Decorative Arts Exhibition of 1925. In 1925 she donated 227 of her battlefield paintings to the Canadian Public Archives.

In 1923, she returned to Winnipeg, having been blinded in one eye by an illness, and opened a teaching studio. In 1929, she moved to Vancouver and opened a teaching studio there. In 1948 she closed her studio due to poor health and financial difficulties. She died in Vancouver in 1954 at the age of 81.